Installing a satellite dish? Choose the right scaffold.

The model for this work is the Altrex RS TOWER 52 in the 135 cm width. A broad platform is no indulgence here, because the reflector goes up whole and has to lie flat somewhere while you offer it to the mast. On a narrow deck that panel leans against the guard rail or against your shins the whole time, and you only want to carry it up once. The full choice sits on the page about mobile towers available to hire.

The 245 cm platform length counts almost as heavily. Onto it go the wall bracket, the mast, a drill with a long masonry bit, a box of anchors and a drum of coaxial cable, and every one of those has to stay put while you turn around. Put two people up there, one on the drill and one steadying the bracket, and the boards fill faster than anyone expects. Let that weigh on the model you pick, because installing a satellite dish is bulky work.

The 75 cm width only enters the conversation when the route to the wall forces it, a side gate under a metre being the usual culprit. You give up elbow room and carry the load in two trips, mast and bracket first and the reflector later on. Measure the narrowest pinch point on your route before booking, because a broad tower that will not pass the gate ends up standing in the wrong place for the whole of the hire period, and no amount of goodwill fixes that afterwards.

The top of this job is the top of the wall bracket, not the ridge of the roof. On a three storey house it usually sits a little under the gutter, which lands you in the 8 to 12 metre band. Working height is the height of the boards under your feet with roughly two metres of arm reach added on, so your platform ends up between six and ten metres. Which build corresponds is set out under ten metres of reach explained, alongside the platform heights that go with it.

Begin measuring at the ground where the castors will sit, not at the doorstep. If the garden path drops half a metre towards the boundary, that difference simply adds to the reach you need. Look up as well, at any overhang, bay or balcony projecting above the mounting point. Where one of those exists you set the tower further out from the wall and need rather more build to still arrive at the bracket with your hands free and your body upright.

Hiring short punishes you immediately. Lose that final half metre and you are drilling into brickwork with your arms above your head, the bit wanders off line, and the anchor never grips as it should. That very hole then has to hold a panel which behaves like a sail. Take the taller build and drill at shoulder level instead. A build one lift taller costs far less than a second hire period. If an aerial near the ridge is also planned, book the greater reach at once and save yourself a second hire period.

The tower belongs squarely beneath the mounting point, which for a dish is nearly always the front elevation or a side wall close to the meter cupboard. Under the base you want a level strip noticeably wider than the frame itself, because the stabilisers reach out at an angle. Slabs, a drive or well trodden gravel all carry the load. A planting bed that softens after rain under the castors is not a surface on which anybody should be truing a mast.

Along a front elevation the obstacles queue up: a cycle rack, a knee high hedge, wheelie bins, an inspection cover exactly where a stabiliser wants to land, and a window sill no upright should touch. Move all of it before the delivery arrives and you will not be shuffling anything mid job. Where part of the frame stands on the footway, leave room beside it for people to pass. For a falling path, the guidance on uneven ground applies.

Let the cable run help choose the spot. Coax travels from the dish along the wall to the point where it goes inside, and from a single position you want both the bracket and that entry within reach. If that hole sits two metres to one side, stand the tower so both fall inside an arm's length of each other. Pace the route out at ground level first, or installing a satellite dish turns into two separate builds on the same wall.

The fixing work itself runs from half a day to a full one. Setting out the bracket, drilling, placing anchors, fitting the mast, hanging the reflector and dressing the cable is steady rather than slow work, provided the brickwork behaves itself. Even so, almost nobody hires for just the one day. Raising the tower has to happen before any of that, and drilling, mounting and connecting indoors on that same date only works when nothing at all surprises you.

So reckon on two hire days: one to build and to set out the mounting point, one to drill, fix, connect and check. There is little waiting time built in, unless you are using resin anchors or have a hole to make good before continuing. Weather governs this more than materials do. Nobody hangs a reflector in a strong wind, and when it blows the whole sequence slides a day, so pick the calmest date in the forecast.

The tariff works in your favour there. Only the opening twenty four hours attract the whole rate; every further day after that carries a reduction of ninety five per cent, so a spare date hardly shows in the rental price at all. Plan too tightly and you are standing beside a mounted bracket with no dish on it, waiting for the van. Booking that extra day up front beats extending afterwards on work of this kind, and it takes away the temptation to rush a fixing which then has to hold for years on end.

Drill your anchor holes into whole bricks and never into the joints. Mortar is softer, it crumbles around the hole and it will never hold a plug the way the brick itself does. So offer the bracket up to the wall, mark through it, then slide your marks a few centimetres until every hole lands in the middle of a brick. From a platform that does not move you can take that measurement calmly; on a ladder the marks stay where they first fell.

Carry up everything you need in one trip. The mast has to finish plumb, because a mast out of true throws the whole reflector off and no setting afterwards will rescue it. Level on the tube, two bolts slack, adjust, tighten again: none of that is work you want to abandon halfway down for a spanner. Lay out the level, the open ended spanners, the anchors and the reflector on the boards before you climb, and installing a satellite dish stays one continuous job.

Settle the cable count before you go up. A single receiver means one coax, two tuners mean two, and a multiswitch serving several floors pushes that towards four. That number sets the diameter of the entry you drill, and one hole done properly beats a second one alongside it later. With 245 cm of boards the drum can also be unrolled tidily instead of being hung over the guard rail, and anything left leaning against that rail is one gust away from the pavement below.

What arrives is a complete set of parts, counted before it leaves us. Decide beforehand where that pile may land: keep the strip beneath the wall empty, because the tower goes up there. The drive or a corner of the garden serves better than a narrow side alley, which is exactly where you will later be walking with a reflector under your arm. A reservation confirmed before three o'clock on a working day puts everything on site the next working day.

You choose the arrival date and you choose the day we take it away again, and on this job let the wind have a vote. Have the parts brought on a quiet day, build that afternoon and fix the following morning. Erecting is your side of the bargain; we neither build towers nor deliver them standing. Two people with the manual and the film to hand need about half a day, which belongs in the plan separately from the fixing work itself.

Living near Amsterdam gives you a second option: the parts may be collected in person, free of charge and by appointment, from Zeeburgerpad 89, as long as your vehicle takes the lot in one load. Once the dish is up, tested and signed off indoors, dismantle the tower and return the parts to the spot where they were dropped, and our driver calls round to load them. The sequence for each lift is in this walk through of the build order.

Every tower in the fleet answers to EN 1004, and load class 3 permits two hundred kilograms of load on each square metre of platform. For this job you stay well under that, even with a reflector, a mast and a cordless drill aboard. Pay attention once two of you are up there together with a cable drum and a tool box as well. What the class means day to day is set out in this explanation of the standard.

The ordinary rules apply in full. All four brakes go on before anybody climbs, the tower is only moved with an empty platform and nobody aboard, and work stops when it starts blowing hard. That wind limit is no formality when a dish is involved: the reflector is a sail, and the moment you hold it one handed to slide it over the mast the wind pulls straight at it. Get it bolted before you let go of it.

The risks that actually matter here travel downwards. Brick dust and grit fall vertically, so keep the strip below the boards empty and park no car or bicycle there. A tool balanced on the edge will follow sooner or later, so everything lives in the middle of the deck. A dropped reflector takes the cable with it. Beside a street that is no idle worry while installing a satellite dish, so agree who is watching the ground before the first fixing is touched.